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Open Sesame: Sync, save and search for all your favorite recipes with this iOS app

Whether you’re a novice in the kitchen or a pro, there’s no shortage of apps to help with your culinary endeavors. And Sesame for iOS is the latest entrant to the busy space, promising to bring some much needed organization to the table.

Sesame is designed to help you collate recipes from across the Web – a bit like Pocket, but specifically for recipes. And here’s how it works.

Sesame

When you first launch the app, you’ll see three main boxes – one for searching the Web for recipes, one for accessing your saved recipes and one that takes you straight to your favorites. You can actually set the app to go straight to your saved recipes when you launch it, by flicking a switch under ‘Settings’.

Contained within Sesame is a mini browser that takes you straight to Google Search. When you find a suitable recipe, hit ‘Save Recipe’ and it will be added to your personal library to access offline.

You can also add tags to the saved recipe, which should help you filter down at a later point by category, including cuisine, meal-type, diet, and ingredients.

Sesame serves up its own view of the original recipe (though it also links to the actual original too), and makes it easy to add items to a personal shopping list, which can then be ‘crossed off’ with a single tap.

And you’ll be pleased to know it also lets you set up a bunch of timers to ensure this morning’s breakfast doesn’t end up as the dog’s dinner.

Though Sesame will set you back $4.99 in the first instance, it is actually optimized for both iPhone and iPad, which means you only have to fork out once. Alternatives such as Paprika will cost you $4.99 EACH for iPhone and iPad, however Paprika is infinitely more cross-platform – with apps for Android, Kindle Fire, NOOK and Mac (which will cost you more money, admittedly), not to mention bookmarklets for your browser.

Indeed, that’s the one thing I’d say is missing here with Sesame – while it does provide cloud synchronization between your iPhone and iPad, it doesn’t let you easily sync things up from your main computer, one that doesn’t involve emailing yourself URLs. An add-on for Chrome, Firefox and Safari would be a wise move here I think.

It’s also worth noting that Sesame lets you manually include your own recipes too, including the dish name, ingredients, and a photo of the final product.

Given this is an app very much designed for use in the kitchen, it would also be nice to see some hands-free features integrated, such as voice prompts or auto-scroll, so you don’t have to smudge your screen with mucky, flour-ridden fingers. But that can perhaps come later.

You can grab Sesame for iOS now, or if you’re still not sure about it, check out the official promo skit below.